Thinking and Teaching:

Remixing Approaches to Romanticism

By Erin Saladin, Lenora Hanson, and Indu Ohri 

Constellation 1: Nature and Ecology (Erin Saladin) 

In God Is Red: A Native View of Religion  (1973), Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) argued that the Western relationship to land, place, or space is always filtered through Christian notions of history and time. Many indigenous cultures, he claimed, think of time and history as secondary to land, place, and space: “what happened here” is a more generative and sensical question than “what happened then.” Romanticism has traditionally been anchored to a specific historical period. Many scholars have made a push to extend the geographical borders of the field, recognizing that the Romantic period contains stories and lives outside of the British Isles.[2] To make the study of Romanticism still more open to non-Western epistemologies, it may be helpful to think about nature and ecology as topics that sometimes converge with or contain Romanticism, rather than as topics within the Romantic period. That is, currents of what we call Romanticism may emerge in a geographical place not because of “what happened then” but because of “what happened there.” This approach allows Romantic ideas about nature and ecology to come into view as one way of thinking about space, rather than as the way a certain time indelibly shaped humans’ relationship to space. It begins to put into practice Deloria and other Indigenous and Black studies critics’ resistance to the notion that history is always building toward an all-encompassing telos. By presenting English Romanticism as something that emerged in a certain place, we move away from the notion that students must read English literature of the 1790s to 1830s before they can interact with Romantic-seeming works produced outside of England.

         The following texts might be presented in various combinations to apply this approach in the classroom. All the texts attend in some way to the particularities of places and spaces, rather than offering a primarily global picture of a moment in time. Assigning these texts in a course that deals with nature, ecology, and Romanticism can encourage students to think about the global by way of the local instead of by way of England and Europe. This partial list focuses most heavily on North America and should be used as a starting point, rather than an ending point. The list is by no means exhaustive, and North America is by no means the only region around which place-based scholarship exists. Many of these texts may be excerpted for teaching to undergraduates, both to allow for close textual engagement and to ease the financial burden on students of buying entire books.

 

Keywords: 

Beauty and the Sublime, Wilderness and Civilization, Sovereignty and Borders, Spatiality and Temporality, Reading and Writing Landscapes, Visual and Multimedia Artifacts

List of Texts 

Primary Sources:

William Apess, On Our Own Ground (1829)

Christopher Columbus, Journal (1492-3)

Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005)

Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (1993)

Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (1735)

Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan  (1723-92)

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man  (1794)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Secondary Sources:

Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (1989)

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast  (2008)

Margaret M. Bruchac, Siobhan M. Hart, and H. Martin Wobst, editors. Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonization (2010).

William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1995) https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html 

Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (1998)

Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion  (1973)

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (1998)

Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002)

Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17.3. (2013) 

Marla Miller, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (2019) 

http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/home/contents.html

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

Mary Louise Pratt, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of América.” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. Routledge (2007)

Images

Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and Jace Weaver, American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006)

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/the-american-wing/native-perspectives [This site features Euro-American art, much of which has generally been interpreted as documentation of the sublime American landscape, reinterpreted and recontextualized by Native American artists and critics.]

Beauty and the Sublime

William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1995) https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html

Mary Louise Pratt, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of América.” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. Routledge (2007)

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man  (1794)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/the-american-wing/native-perspectives [This site features Euro-American art, much of which has generally been interpreted as documentation of the sublime American landscape, reinterpreted and recontextualized by Native American artists and critics.]


Wilderness and Civilization

Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (1989)

William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1995) https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html

Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005)

Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/the-american-wing/native-perspectives [This site features Euro-American art, much of which has generally been interpreted as documentation of the sublime American landscape, reinterpreted and recontextualized by Native American artists and critics.]

Sovereignty and Borders

William Apess, On Our Own Ground (1829)

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast  (2008)

Margaret M. Bruchac, Siobhan M. Hart, and H. Martin Wobst, editors. Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonization (2010)

Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion  (1973)

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (1998)

Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (1993)

Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan (2006)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and Jace Weaver, American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006)

Spatiality and Temporality

Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (1989)

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008)

Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (1998)

Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973)

Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17.3 (2013)

Marla Miller, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (2019)

Reading and Writing Landscapes

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008)

Christopher Columbus, Journal (1492-3)

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (1998)

Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005)

Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (1735)

Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17.3 (2013)

Marla Miller, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (2019)

Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan (2006)

Mary Louise Pratt, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of América.” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (2007)

http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/home/contents.html

Visual and Multimedia Artifacts 

Lisa Brooks, maps from The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008)

Margaret M. Bruchac, Siobhan M. Hart, and H. Martin Wobst, editors. Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonization (2010)

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (1998)

http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/home/contents.html

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/the-american-wing/native-perspectives [This site features Euro-American art, much of which has generally been interpreted as documentation of the sublime American landscape, reinterpreted and recontextualized by Native American artists and critics.]

[1] Thanks to Mary Biggs for this and other helpful suggestions.

[2] For example, Nicole Aljoe and Kerry Sinanan have done work in the archive and the classroom as well as in their scholarly writing to shift attention to the Caribbean as an important site of knowledge production in the Romantic period.

Constellation 2: Revolution and Rebellion (Lenora Hanson)

Definitions of Romanticism have long been grounded in the watershed event of the French Revolution. Even when Romanticism is not contextualized by the declaration of liberté, égalité, fraternité in France, the framing of Romantic texts through questions of popular sovereignty, the nation-state, and historical progress keep us rooted in a deeply European epistemology of uprising.  Thus, our historical and conceptual definitions of Romanticism can inadvertently racialize instead of focusing on the interrelatedness of global space (c.f., Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 1-17). In this section, we reposition Romantic revolutions and rebellions in a global framework that emphasizes temporally coinciding or overlapping struggles, and which cannot be subsumed under concepts of universal freedom or individual sovereignty. Drawing from examples in Palestine, Jamaica, Haiti/Saint-Domingue, Ireland, and England, this section articulates struggles against racial capitalism with those against industrial exploitation, and uprisings for regional autonomy with reappropriations of communal means of subsistence. This shift toward the global reconfigures the epistemologies and ideologies that scaffold our definitions of Romanticism as well as the primacy of the modern subject and the liberal nation-state. The texts included in this section offer a different lexicon for Romantic revolution, such as Obi/Obeah, marronage, thieves, rebel woman, slavery and its afterlives, riot, sabotage, and forced labor. Similarly, they offer significant redefinitions of standard keywords for Romanticism, including autonomy, resistance, tradition, and freedom. Texts below are organized first through geography and then remixed to show how they might be used in different subtopic arrangements. Whereas the former will offer a sense of specific locality, the latter offers a way to think more globally about coinciding forms of struggle. 

Keywords: 

Global Anti-Imperialism, Abolition, Black Radical Tradition, Uprising, Rebellion, Autonomy


Palestine and the Ottoman Empire

Primary Sources:

  • James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Palestine (1821)

  • John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822)

  • Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (1989)

  • Percy Shelley, Laon and Cythna (1817)

  • Constantin Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt, in the years 1783, 1784, and 1785 (1788)

Secondary Sources:

  • Beshara Doumani, “Introduction” and “The Meanings of Autonomy,” Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabul Nablus (1995)

  • Albert Hourani, “The Changing Balance of Power in the Eighteenth Century,” A History of the Arab Peoples (2002)

  • Ahmad Hasan Joudah, “Zahir al-Umar and the First Autonomous Regime in Ottoman Palestine (1744-1775),” Jerusalem Quarterly, nos. 63/4: 72-86.

  • Adel Manna, “Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Rebellions in Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies,  vol. 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 54-66.

  • “Palestine: Romanticism’s Contemporary,” Special Forum, Studies in Romanticism, (forthcoming, Summer 2023)

  • Gabriel Polley, “‘Holy Land on the Brain: Introduction” and “‘The Feelings of a Christian Traveller’: Edward Robinson and the Birth of Biblical Palestine,” Palestine in the Victorian Age (2022)

  • S. Abu Sitta, “The Survey of Western Palestine Revisited: The Visible and the Hidden,” Palestine Land Society (2020) https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/speeches/2020/the-survey-of-western-palestine-revisited

Images:

British West Indies

Primary Sources:

  • William Earle, Obi or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800)

  • Bryan Edwards, “Book IV, Chap. III,” “Book IV. Appendix No. I,”  The History, Civil, and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies Vol. 1 (1793)

  • —., “Book I, Appendix No. 2,” The History, Civil, and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies Vol. 1 (1801)

  • C. L. G. Harris, “The Spirit of Nanny,” The Sunday Gleaner (August 6, 1967)

  • Mary Prince, Susannah Strickland, Thomas Pringle, The History of Mary Prince (1831)

  • James Williams, A Narrative of the Events since the First of August, 1834 by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (1837) 

Secondary Sources:

  • Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaica Outlaw, 1780-2015 (2017)

  • Lucille Mair, The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies during Slavery (1975)

  • Diana Paton, No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (2004)

  • Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (2000)

  • Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (2020)

Images:

Great Britain

Primary Sources:

  • Kevin Binfield, editor, Writing of the Luddites (2004)

  • William Blake, “America, A Prophecy” (1793)

  • Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800)

  • London Corresponding Society, “Reformers no Rioters” (1794)

  • R. R. Madden, Literary Remains of the United Irishmen of 1798, and selections from other popular lyrics of their  times (1846)

  • Hannah More, “The Riot: Or, Half a Loaf Is Better Than No Bread” and “A Hymn of Praise, for the Abundant Harvest of 1796,” Village Politics: A Dialogue (1792)

  • Percy Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy” (1832)

  • —, “Queen Mab” (1813)

  • Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn, ed. Ian McCalman (1991)

Secondary Sources:

  • Shelby Johnson, “‘The fate of St. Domingo awaits you’: Robert Wedderburn’s Unfinished Revolution,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation vol. 61, no. 3 (2020): 373-390.

  • Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard (2019)

  • Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (2014)

  • —, “Blake’s Metropolitan Radicalism,” Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840, eds. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (2005)

  • S. S. Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2006)

  • E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” The Essential E. P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (2001)

Images:


Haiti/Saint Domingue 

Primary Sources:

  • Émeric Bergeaud, Stella: A Novel of the Haitian Revolution, trans. and ed. Lesley S. Curtis and Christian Mucher (1859)

  • Selections from Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804

  • —, “Letters from the Slave Revolt in Martinique” (1789)

  • —, The Free Citizens of Color, “Address to our National Assembly” (1789)

  • —, “Insurgent Responses to Emancipation” (1793)

  • —, “The Abolition of Slavery” (1794)

  • —, “Proclamations” (1794)

  • —, “From the Constitution of the French Colony of Saint-Domingue” (1801)

  • —, “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804)

  • —, “Haitian Constitution” (1805)

  • Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Haitian Revolution, ed. Nick Nesbitt (2019)

  • William Wordsworth, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1802/3) https://thelouvertureproject.org/index.php?title=To_Toussaint_Louverture_-_poem_by_Wordsworth 

Secondary Sources:

  • Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (1988)

  • Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1795-1865 (2015)

  • C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., (1989)

  • Haiti and the Atlantic World, ed. Julia Gaffield, “Dessalines Reader,” https://haitidoi.com/dessalines-reader/

Images:

Internal Remixes

Global Anti-Imperialism 

Primary Sources:

  • William Blake, “America, A Prophecy” (1793)

  • James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Palestine (1821/1822)

  • William Earle, Obi or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800)

  • R. R. Madden, Literary Remains of the United Irishmen of 1798, and selections from other popular lyrics of their times (1846)

  • Percy Shelley, Laon and Cythna (1817)

  • Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn, ed. Ian McCalman (1991)

Secondary Sources:

  • Beshara Doumani, “Introduction” and “The Meanings of Autonomy,” Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabul Nablus (1995)

  • Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard (2019)

  • Makdisi, “Blake’s metropolitan radicalism,” Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840, eds. James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (2005)

  • Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (2020)


Autonomy and the Black Radical Tradition

Primary Sources:

  • Selections from Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, eds., Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804

  • Bryan Edwards, “Book IV, Chap. III,” “Book IV. Appendix No. I,”  The History, Civil, and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies  Vol. 1 (1793)

  • —, “Book I, Appendix No. 2,” The History, Civil, and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies Vol. 1 (1801)

  • Mary Prince, Susannah Strickland, Thomas Pringle, The History of Mary Prince, (1831)

  • Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn, ed. Ian McCalman (1991)

Secondary Sources:

  • C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., (1989)

  • Lucille Mair, The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies during Slavery (1975)

  • Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (2000)

  • Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (2020)

Constellation 3: Imagination (Indu Ohri)

This constellation aims to expand beyond the figures, tropes, and images traditionally associated with the Romantic imagination by centering on the African American writer Phillis Wheatley, and especially her poem “On Imagination” (1773). The constellation uses “On Imagination” as a starting point to build a more globalized and capacious view of imagination rooted in indigenous writings, visual artifacts, and art forms from the seventeenth century to today. The prevailing tendency in Romantic Studies is to focus on white writers and artists from 1760-1860, which severely limits our understanding of the imagination in the past and present. Recent scholarship on “On Imagination” exploring Wheatley’s key position in Romanticism (Shields) and the interplay between her poem and writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination”) offers new ways of thinking about this concept. In Wheatley’s day, “On Imagination” became popular and was frequently quoted in abolitionist literature because it testifies to the creativity, artistry, and subjectivity of Black people at a time when whites generally assumed they were mentally inferior. Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats also portray women of color with strong musical genius, mystical vision, and creative powers such as the Abyssinian maid, the Witch of Atlas, and Lamia (who is originally from North Africa) (Lee).

Along with examining Wheatley’s works, students can consider alternative models of originality, creativity, and aesthetics from indigenous writers such as Olaudah Equiano, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and Henry Derozio. For instance, fancy was often subordinated to imagination as a feminine, flighty, and capricious mental faculty that inspired trivial writings, but it also presents a challenge to patriarchal society. Although modern scholars claim that Wheatley, Johnston, and Derozio’s poetry displays “imitative” qualities, we may ask students how these writers create, reshape, or undercut common Romantic tropes. For instance, the writers and artists listed below often use music and dance as metaphors for the creative process, particularly the acts of singing and playing various instruments (the harp, the lute, and the lyre). Instead of seeing them as merely “imitating” white neoclassical and Romantic writers, we can situate these creators in complex networks of citation, influence, and adaptation. The recent campaign to cite women and people of color promoted by Sara Ahmed and The Black Women’s Citation Collective also extends to the need to teach, research, and write about the work of authors and artists from around the world. Therefore, this constellation includes literature, scholarship, and visual artifacts related to the writers and artists’ respective heritages (West African, Ojibwe, Hawaiian, South American, Indian, and Vietnamese).

The losses to the archive of Wheatley’s early life in West Africa and her second manuscript of poems have inspired Black writers to produce imagined recreations of her biography such as Alison Clarke’s Phillis: A Poetry Collection (2020). That being said, instructors should avoid just rebuilding the canon using Black writers or tracing a genealogy of influence among Black authors because these approaches reinscribe many of the current problems with Romantic Studies (Salih). By identifying Wheatley as a griotte/djeliya, Clarke places her within the creative traditions of West African female wordsmiths who advise rulers, conduct negotiations, and celebrate major events (Hale “Griottes”). For centuries, these women have used their artistic talents to consolidate their authority, financially support themselves, and fulfill various roles in their communities. Throughout her poetry, Wheatley’s devout references to taking imaginative flights into the heavens and seeing God’s “bright abode” indicate divine vision, which many writers and artists who contemplate the sacred also possess (“On Imagination,” line 15). A sense of wonder is embedded in the structure of Gronniosaw’s and Equiano’s slave narratives and shapes their experiences of the natural world’s marvels, their first encounters with white people, and their reactions to God’s divine intervention. Female mystics, among them Ursula de Jesús, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and various Shaker women, empowered themselves through their spiritual gifts, which include dreams, clairvoyance, and drawing. These writers and artists often represent imaginative activity or creative expression as inspiring love for a beloved, God, or humanity. The final remix could allow students to reflect on how the imagination can foster human relationships, bring people closer to the divine, or instill deeper values such as care, empathy, and understanding (c.f., Hite and Koretsky).

Keywords:

Fancy, Music and Dance, Citation, Griotte/Djeliya, Divine Vision, Love

Primary Sources: 

  • Anna Barbauld, “On a Summer Evening’s Meditation” (1773) 

  • Alison Clarke, Phillis: A Poetry Collection (2020)

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (1797) 

  • Henry L. V. Derozio, “The Harp of India” (1827) 

  • —, “The Poet’s Habitation: A Fragment” (1826) 

  • —, “Poetry” (1827)

  • —, “Sappho” (1827) 

  • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, ed. Brycchan Carey (2018)

  • James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw: An African Prince, As Related by Himself (1770) 

  • S. N. Haleʻole, The Hawaiian Romance of Laieikawai (1863) 

  • Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes (2010) 

  • Rebecca Cox Jackson, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Jean McMahon Humez (1981) 

  • Ursula de Jesús, The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula De Jesús, ed. Nancy E. Van Deusen (2004) 

  • Ba Juni, Djeliya: A West African Epic Fantasy (2021) 

  • John Keats, “Lamia” (1819) 

  • Letitia Landon, “Sappho’s Song” (1824)

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855)

  • Du Nguyễn, The Song of Kiều: A New Lament, trans. Timothy Allen (2019) 

  • Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (2007). 

  • —, “An Answer to a Remonstrance on my Being Melancholy…”

  • —, “Character of Aboriginal Historical Tradition: To the Editor of the Muzzinyegun”

  • —, “On Meditation” 

  • —, “Pensive Hours” 

  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas” (1820) 

  • Phillis Wheatley, “An Address to the Deist–1767” (1767)

  • —, “On Imagination” (1773)

  • —, “On Recollection” (1773)

  • —, “To S. M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works” (1773)

  • —, “Thoughts On the Works of Providence” (1773)

Secondary Sources:

  • Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017).

  • Timothy Allen, “Introduction.” The Song of Kiều: A New Lament, trans. Timothy Allen (2019).  

  • Joanna Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, vol. 82, no. 1 (2010): 1-28. 

  • Manu Samriti Chander, “Chapter 1: Henry Derozio and the Beginnings of Indian Romanticism,” Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (2017). 

  • Thomas A. Hale, “Griottes: Female Voices from West Africa,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 3 (1994): 71-91. 

  • Michelle S. Hite and Deanna P. Koretsky, “Loving Blackness across Arts and Sciences,” Early American Literature, vol. 57, no. 3 (2022): 827-834. 

  • Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002).

  • Dana Murphy, “Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival,” African American Review, vol. 53, no. 4 (2020): 299-313. 

  • Joel Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination in Wheatley and Coleridge,” Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830, eds. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (2011).  

  • Mark Rose, Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (2016).

  • Bethany Schneider, “Not for Citation: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Synchronic Strategies,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 54 (2008): 111-144.

  • John C. Shields, Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics (2010). 

  • Christen A. Smith et al., “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement),” Feminist Anthropology, vol. 2 (2021). 

  • Maura Josephine Smyth, Women Writing Fancy: Authorship and Autonomy from 1611 to 1812 (2017). 

  • Daniel E. White, “Chapter Three: ‘I Would Not Have the Day Return’: Henry Derozio and Rammohun Roy in Cosmopolitan Calcutta,” From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793-1835 (2013). 

  • Kacie L. Wills, “Romantic Fancy in the Context of Pacific Exploration,” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 68 (2019): 192-194. 

List of Images and Visual Artifacts

Remixed Lists for Each Keyword 

Fancy 

Primary Sources:

  • Anna Barbauld, “On a Summer Evening’s Meditation” (1773)

  • Jane Schoolcraft Johnston, “An Answer to a Remonstrance on my Being Melancholy…”

  • —, “Character of Aboriginal Historical Tradition: To the Editor of the Muzzinyegun” 

  • Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” (1773) 

Secondary Sources:

  • Michelle S. Hite and Deanna P. Koretsky, “Loving Blackness across Arts and Sciences,” Early American Literature, vol. 57, no. 3 (2022): 827-34. 

  • Joel Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination in Wheatley and Coleridge,” Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830, eds. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (2011).  

  • John C. Shields, Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics (2010).

  • Maura Josephine Smyth, Women Writing Fancy: Authorship and Autonomy From 1611 to 1812 (2017). 

  • Kacie L. Wills, “Romantic Fancy in the Context of Pacific Exploration,” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 68 (2019): 192-94.

Images:

Music and Dance

Primary Sources:

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (1797)

  • Henry L. V. Derozio, “The Harp of India” (1827)

  • —, “Poetry” (1827)

  • Ba Juni, Djeliya: A West African Epic Fantasy (2021). 

  • Letitia Landon, “Sappho’s Song” (1824)

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855)

  • Du Nguyễn, The Song of Kiều: A New Lament, trans. Timothy Allen (2019). 

  • Phillis Wheatley, “On Recollection” (1773)

  • —, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” (1773) 

Secondary Sources:

  • Manu Samriti Chander, “Chapter 1: Henry Derozio and the Beginnings of Indian Romanticism,” Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (2017).  

  • Thomas A. Hale, “Griottes: Female Voices from West Africa,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 3 (1994): 71-91. 

  • Dana Murphy, “Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival,” African American Review, vol. 53, no. 4 (2020): 299-313.

Images: 

Citation

Primary Sources:

  • Alison Clarke, Phillis: A Poetry Collection (2020).

  • Henry L. V. Derozio, “Sappho” (1827) 

  • Ba Juni, Djeliya: A West African Epic Fantasy (2021). 

  • Letitia Landon, “Sappho’s Song” (1824)

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfelllow, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855)

  • Du Nguyễn, The Song of Kiều: A New Lament, trans. Timothy Allen (2019). 

  • Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, “Character of Aboriginal Historical Tradition: To the Editor of the Muzzinyegun” 

  • Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” (1773)

  • —, “To S. M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works” (1773)

Secondary Sources:

  • Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017). 

  • Timothy Allen, “Introduction,” The Song of Kiều: A New Lament, trans. Timothy Allen (2019).  

  • Joanna Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, vol. 82, no. 1 (2010): 1-28.

  • Michelle S. Hite and Deanna P. Koretsky, “Loving Blackness across Arts and Sciences,” Early American Literature, vol. 57, no. 3 (2022): 827-834. 

  • Dana Murphy, “Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival,” African American Review, vol. 53, no. 4 (2020): 299-313. 

  • Joel Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination in Wheatley and Coleridge,” Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830, eds. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (2011): 188-203. 

  • Mark Rose, Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (2016). 

  • Bethany Schneider, “Not for Citation: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Synchronic Strategies,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 54 (2008): 111-144. 

  • Christen A. Smith et al., “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement),” Feminist Anthropology, vol. 2 (2021).  

  • Daniel E. White, “Chapter Three: ‘I Would Not Have the Day Return’: Henry Derozio and Rammohun Roy in Cosmopolitan Calcutta,” From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793-1835 (2013): 98-140. 

Images: 

Griot/Djeliya

Primary Sources: 

  • Alison Clarke, Phillis: A Poetry Collection (2020). 

  • Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes (2010).  

  • Ba Juni, Djeliya: A West African Epic Fantasy (2021). 

Secondary Sources:

  • Thomas A. Hale, “Griottes: Female Voices from West Africa,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 3 (1994): 71-91.  

  • Dana Murphy, “Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival,” African American Review, vol. 53, no. 4 (2020): 299-313.

Images: 

Divine Vision 

Primary Sources: 

  • Anna Barbauld, “On a Summer Evening’s Meditation” (1773)

  • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, ed. Brycchan Carey (2018).

  • James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw: An African Prince, As Related by Himself (1770)

  • S. N. Haleʻole, The Hawaiian Romance of Laieikawai (1863) 

  • Rebecca Cox Jackson, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Jean McMahon Humez (1981). 

  • Ursula de Jesús, The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula De Jesús, ed. Nancy E. Van Deusen (2004).

  • Ba Juni, Djeliya: A West African Epic Fantasy (2021). 

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855)

  • Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, “On Meditation” 

  • —, “Pensive Hours” (1820)

  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas” (1820)

  • Phillis Wheatley, “An Address to the Deist–1767” (1767)

  • —, “To S. M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works” (1773)

Images: 

Love

Primary Sources: 

  • Henry L. V. Derozio, “The Poet’s Habitation: A Fragment” (1826) 

  • —, “Sappho” (1827)

  • Rebecca Cox Jackson, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Jean McMahon Humez (1981). 

  • Ursula de Jesús, The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula De Jesús, ed. Nancy E. Van Deusen (2004).

  • John Keats, “Lamia” (1819)

  • Letitia Landon, “Sappho’s Song” (1824)

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855)

  • Du Nguyễn, The Song of Kiều: A New Lament, trans. Timothy Allen (2019).

Secondary Sources:

  • Michelle S. Hite and Deanna P. Koretsky, “Loving Blackness across Arts and Sciences,” Early American Literature, vol. 57, no. 3 (2022): 827-834. 

  • Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002).

  • Joel Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination in Wheatley and Coleridge,” Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830, eds. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (2011). 

  • Christen A. Smith et al., “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement),” Feminist Anthropology, vol. 2 (2021).   

Images: 

Further Reading: 

Primary Sources: 

  • Joseph Addison, “Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712)

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13 (1817)

  • —, “Eolian Harp” (1795) 

  • Felicia Hemans,“Corinne at the Capital” (1827)

  • —, “The Last Song of Sappho” (1831)

  • —, “To a Wandering Female Singer” (1839)

  • Angela Jackson, “Phillis,” It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems, TriQuarterly (2015).  

  • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (2020). 

  • Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV (1785)

  • Letitia Landon, The Improvisatrice (1824)

  • Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1839)

  • Anne Plato, “Lines, Written upon Being Examined in School Studies for the Preparation of a Teacher” (1841)

  • Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (2008). 

  • Kevin Young, “Homage to Phillis Wheatley,” Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2005 (2017) 

Secondary Sources: 

  • Nicole N. Aljoe et al., “Reading and Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters in Boston,” Early American Literature, vol. 57, no. 3 (2022):  799-814.  

  • Christine R. Cavalier, “Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Sentimental Lessons: Native Literary Collaboration and Resistance,” MELUS, vol. 38, no. 1 (2013): 98-118.

  • Bakary Diaby, “Black Women And/in the Shadow of Romanticism,” European Romantic Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (2019): 249-254. 

  • Julie K. Ellison, “Female Authorship, Public Fancy,” Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (1999)

  • Jennifer Elise Foerster, “Bamewawagezhikaquay: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Postpastoral Poetics,” Eocotone, vol. 28 (2019).  

  • Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (2007)  

  • June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” (2002), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68628/the-difficult-miracle-of-black-poetry-in-america.

  • Joel Pace, “Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, and Self-Mapping,” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 56, no. 1 (2017): 113-123.

  • Sara Salih, “The History of Mary Prince, the Black Subject, and the Black Canon,” Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838, ed. Brycchan Carey (2004).

  • Conrad Schirokaeur, “Reading and Teaching the Tale of Kieu,” Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics, ed. William Thedore de Bary (2011).  

  • Paul Youngquist, “Black Romanticism: A Manifesto,” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 56, no. 1 (2017): 3-14.

  • Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1972)